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Stakeholders want hospitals to share patients diagnostic reports
What you need to know:
- The healthcare industry produces 30 percent of all data, yet the general public is uninformed of how this data is gathered.
Dar es Salaam. Health stakeholders are urging hospitals to give patients access to diagnostic reports so they can have accurate records and a solid background.
According to estimates, the healthcare industry produces 30 percent of all data, yet the general public is uninformed of how this data is gathered, who is in charge of its storage, and how it is used.
They believe that citizens have the right to own and control their health data, particularly in digital form, and that health planners and researchers should only access it with their permission.
They questioned procedures put in place by both public and private hospitals when patients request data for personal use.
The Tanzania Network of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (TNW+) executive director, Ms Joan Chamungu, said she was once denied personal information despite fulfilling all the requirements.
“I requested my health data for personal use, however, the request was turned down despite meeting all requirements,” she said.
Furthermore, Ms Chamungu stated that the doctor in charge requested that she obtain consent from higher authorities in order for the data to be provided.
Despite the fact that the hospitals accumulated information that she shared on routine visits, she claimed that bureaucracy was accentuated.
“The doctor outlined a long procedure to be followed in order for the data to be provided, including visiting a special digital unit centred at the ministry of Health, something that I considered to be cumbersome,” she said.
However, a senior official at the ministry of Health who declined to be named told this newspaper that the ministry was functioning in accordance with the country’s Personal Data Protection Act of 2022, which grants patients the right to own their data.
“Any patient has the right to own the hospital’s data, as long as he or she has met procedures described by the law, for instance, the provision of important documents such as national ID numbers when requesting data,” he said, noting that the ministry considers such data to be patients’ properties.
The director of monitoring and evaluation at the Health Docket, Mr Tumainiel Macha, said personal data are the rights of an individual patient, provided the client has been treated in a particular hospital.
“This is because the said personal records can help facilitate treatment in other hospitals once a patient has been referred for specialised treatment, including outside the country,” he said.
“Doctors in the said hospital can use extracted patients’ data to understand the patient’s background,” he added.
According to him, Health minister Ummy Mwalimu has been insisting on the provision of feedback to patients in order to increase awareness about the disease they are suffering from.
